An adept survey of the outwardly placid, internally conflicted life of an English counterpart to Emily Dickinson. Although never formally part of the Pre-Raphaelite poetic school, which included her brother Gabriel (better known to posterity as Dante Gabriel Rossetti), William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne, Christina Rossetti has always been linked to it. Marsh (The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, not reviewed) gives full attention to both the individual and her unique variety of fantastic and devotional poetry. With her Victorian popularity, Rossetti gained a reputation for High Anglican religiosity and sepulchral melancholy, but Marsh finds her beliefs more complex and even detects a sense of humor. Though Rossetti makes a less interesting subject than the flamboyant Gabriel, Marsh delineates an appealing person while examining her adolescent nervous breakdown, abortive engagement to a lapsed Catholic painter, frustrated love for an absentminded scholar, and relationships with her devout but hearty sister, Maria, and with her brothers, Gabriel and William, toward whom she felt both supportive and competitive. The author gives an intelligent interpretation of Rossetti's poetry and its development. Analyzing Rossetti's most famous poem, the sensuous, enigmatic allegory of temptation and sisterhood ``Goblin Market,'' Marsh argues convincingly that it was inspired by her work at a reformatory for young prostitutes. More hypothetically, she gives a provocative reading of Rossetti's early nightmare poems to suggest the possibility of sexual abuse by her invalid father, while admitting that there is no evidence for this speculation. Despite Marsh's occasional attempts to update Rossetti's spirit to fit current feminist molds, the writer remains firmly of her time. The author's steady, sympathetic course through Rossetti's divided life enables readers to delve into the intense and original self most fully expressed in her poetry. (16 pages b&w photos and illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-83517-X
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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